DeGeneres tweeted the picture on her own account and captioned it: “If only Bradley’s arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars”.

It reached 779,295 retweets in approximately half an hour, and so beat a record previously held by the US president, when he tweeted an image titled “Four more years” at the point of his re-election in November 2012.

Within an hour, the DeGeneres tweet had claimed over a million retweets. The Oscars host later said that Twitter had temporarily crashed because of her actions and added: “We really just made history. We’re all winners tonight.”